If you only looked at the index, you would think the market just decided to rip to new all-time highs for no reason. That is not what happened. Underneath, roughly seven separate things resolved inside about five or six days, and each one removed a weight the market had been carrying for two months.
FOMC cleared with no rate hike. A heavily levered AI fund finally capitulated and that day marked the bottom. MAG earnings got out of the way. Trump stepped back from Iran again and said we are negotiating, the exact same trigger that launched the April move. JP Morgan called the deleveraging over. And the VIX ran up to 20 and could not get through it.
That last one is the piece I would not skip. Over 20 on the VIX and you are having a bad day. Fear got there during the worst of the AI unwind and still failed, which told you the damage was concentrated in tech, AI, and semis instead of spreading everywhere. $SMH went outside its lower channel and flipped straight back, and $NBIS shows you what real deleveraging looks like on a chart.
Your Profit Pilot,
TG Watkins
Volume is what tells you whether a move is real or whether it is just noise, and it is a big part of why I trust some breakouts and leave others alone. Raghee just walked through her Volume Max 2.0 Toolkit and how she reads volume to time entries and exits. If you missed it live, the replay is up NOW.
